'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
30 October 2015
IT IS not very pleasant when serious people around the world – historians, psychiatrists, diplomats – ask themselves if my prime minister is completely sane.
**Netanyahu meets with British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, 24 July 2014 | Author: Foreign and Commonwealth Office | Wikimedia Commons
But this is happening now. And not only abroad. More and more people in Israel are asking themselves the same question.
This year’s El Niño can already lay claim to spawning Mexico’s record-breaking Hurricane Patricia or contributing to one of the worst ever outbreaks of peatland and forest fires in Indonesia, but it might only be just getting started.
Hurricane Patricia Bears Down on Mexico’s Pacific Coast [October 2015] | Source: Greenpeace
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on 30 October 2015 said that an estimated two million children in Iraq have no access to school and warned that an additional 1.2 million may be at the risk of dropping out due to continuous violence disrupting academic years.
Students sit in front of new textbooks in one of 12 tented classrooms at Al Takiya Al Kasnazaniya camp for internally displaced persons in Karkh District, Baghdad Governorate, Iraq. Photo: UNICEF/Wathiq Khuzaie
“The impact of conflict, violence and displacement on education in Iraq is nothing short of devastating,” said Peter Hawkins, UNICEF’s Representative in Iraq.
The recent elections in Switzerland and Poland are good indicators of what will happen elsewhere in Europe, with this irresistible growing wave of refugees. But let us first make some crucial considerations.
Roberto Savio
The first is that the present system of international relations and national governance is not functioning any longer. We are in a period of transition, but nobody knows to where. The left is without a manifesto, and the right is just riding the status quo. There is no long term political thinking.
Second, we are in a “new economy,” based on the supremacy of finance over man’s production.
Unelected officials, like governors of central banks and bankers, have increasingly more power than before.
This “new economy” considers precarious jobs as natural, social inequality as a legitimate reality, the market as the sole basis for societal development and the state as inefficient and a brake to the private sector.
© UNICEF/NYHQ2015–2618/Gilbertson VII
**The yellow sun with twenty-one rays represents Mithra, the Sun as symbol of God, in Yazdani faiths. | The blazing golden sun emblem “Roj”. Sundisk with 21 rays, equal in size and shape. | Author: Taysheyi | Creative Commons
29 October 2015 – At least 15 people have died and some 38 others are missing in five incidents involving smuggler boats carrying hundreds of refugees and migrants by sea between Turkey and the Greek islands, according to the United Nations refugee agency.
A group of refugees disembark from an inflatable boat after reaching the Greek island of Lesvos (30 September 2015). Photo: UNHCR/Achilleas Zavallis
“We have warned for weeks that an already bad situation could get even worse if desperate refugees and migrants must continue to resort to smugglers who send them out to sea despite the worsening weather,” said the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Senior Operations Coordinator for Greece Alessandra Morelli.
TINDOUF, Algeria, 29 October 2015 (Middle East Eye) – Heavy rains have been pounding much of North Africa and Middle East, bringing destruction in their wake and causing heavy flooding, but the torrential downpours have taken a particularly heavy toll on the vulnerable refugee community in Algeria’s Tindouf province.
29 October 2015 – Women in Central America and Mexico are fleeing their countries in rising numbers to escape a surge in deadly, unchecked gang violence, fuelling a looming refugee crisis in the Americas that demands urgent and concerted action by the States of the region, the United Nations refugee agency is warning.
*Photo: Sulma Ortega and her family were victimized by the MS-13 drug cartel in Guatemala and granted asylum in Mexico. But they have received no help from the Mexican government to rebuild their lives there, and they are now looking to reach the US. Photo: Amy Stillman/IRIN
29 October 2015 (WSWS) – Figures released Wednesday by the Social Security Administration (SSA) show that the majority of workers in the United States earn an income that puts them at or near the poverty level for a small family.
Over half of US workers make less than $30,000 per year, and a staggering 40 percent of workers make less than $20,000 per year. The federal poverty line for a family of four is $24,250 and the line for a family of three is $20,090.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 